Couric's first job in 1979 was at the ABC News bureau in Washington, D.C., later joining CNN as an assignment editor. Between 1984 and 1986, she worked as a general-assignment reporter for the then-CBS affiliate WTVJ in Miami, Florida.
During the following two years, she reported for WRC-TV, the NBC owned- and -operated station in Washington, D.C., work which earned her an Associated Press award and an Emmy.[13]

She returned to NBC to co-host the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies with Mike Tirico, and to provide additional Winter Olympic coverage and athlete interviews. During the opening ceremony she suggested, erroneously, that the Dutch use their skates as a normal mode of transportation during wintertime, prompting criticism and bemusement from the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands and others. Couric apologized that her intended compliment didn't "come out" as intended, which the Embassy accepted, and invited her to the Netherlands for a tour.[15][16]

In 1989, Couric joined Today as national political correspondent, becoming a substitute co-host in February 1991 when Norville went on maternity leave. Norville did not return and Couric became permanent co-anchor on April 5, 1991.[17] In 1994, she became co-anchor of Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric—an evening time weekly TV newsmagazine with Tom Brokaw—which was later terminated and folded into part of Dateline NBC, where her reports appeared regularly and she was named the anchor. She remained at Today and NBC News for fifteen years until May 31, 2006, when she announced that she would be going to CBS to anchor the CBS Evening News, becoming the first solo female anchor of the "big three" weekday nightly news broadcasts.[18]

While at NBC, Couric occasionally filled in for Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News. From 1989–1993, Couric also filled in for Maria Shriver on the Sunday Edition of NBC Nightly News and for Garrick Utley on the Saturday Edition of NBC Nightly News. In addition, during her time on Today she served as a host of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for 15 years from 1991–2005.

Couric hosted or worked on a number of news specials, like Everybody's Business: America's Children in 1995. Similar entertainment specials were Legend to Legend Night: A Celebrity Cavalcade in 1993, and Harry Potter: Behind the Magic in 2001. Couric has also co-hosted the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. She has broadcast with Bob Costas, beginning with the 2000 Summer Olympics.

Couric announced on April 5, 2006, that she would be leaving Today.[21] CBS confirmed later the same day that Couric would become the new anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News. Couric would also contribute to 60 Minutes and anchor prime-time news specials for CBS. Couric earned US$15 million per year while at CBS, a salary that made her the highest paid journalist in the world, a salary similar to Barbara Walters' at ABC.[22][23][24][25] She made her first broadcast as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric on September 5, 2006.[26]

CBS heavily promoted Couric's arrival at the network, hoping to revive the evening news format, but there were suggestions that it backfired.[27] Although there was much interest during her first week as anchor,[28]CBS Evening News remained a distant third in viewership, behind ABC World News and NBC Nightly News.[29][30][31] While Couric's ratings improved over her predecessor, Bob Schieffer, ABC's Charles Gibson widened World News' lead over Evening News.[32]

The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric won the 2008 and 2009 Edward R. Murrow Award for best newscast. In 2009, Couric was awarded with the Emmy Governor's Award for her broadcasting career.[33]

In early 2011, Couric announced that she would be leaving her anchor post at CBS Evening News when her contract expired.[36] Couric made her final broadcast in the CBS Evening News chair on Thursday, May 19, 2011.[37]

Couric was the lead reporter for two CBS Reports series, which aired across all CBS News platforms. The first series, "CBS Reports: Children of the Recession", highlighted the pain suffered by the youngest of the then ongoing Great Recession's victims. The series won the Columbia School of Journalism's Alfred DuPont Award for Excellence in Journalism.[42] The second series, which aired in early 2010, was "CBS Reports: Where America Stands", which featured veteran CBS News correspondents reporting on major issues facing the United States in the decade ahead with research by the CBS News Polling Unit.

Similar to colleague Barbara Walters, Couric anchors specials for the network and for the newsmagazine20/20. While she contributes to the news program all throughout the year, in 2011, Couric created her newly annual special The Year with Katie Couric, which is a program that marks the end of the year and covers some of the biggest newsmakers and news events of that year. This is a collaboration with People magazine, which also reflects events in the world of news, sports, politics, and major headlines that helped shape the world. This is very similar to that of Walters's iconic Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People, a year end program that marks the end of the year and acknowledges the people that had the most impact on the year at hand with interviews on their perspective of the year. As part of the special, Couric interviews fellow members of the media that can provide some insight on some events that occurred.

From April 2 to 6, 2012, Couric substituted for co-anchor Robin Roberts on ABC's Good Morning America, her first stint at hosting a morning news show since leaving Today.

On June 6, 2011, ABC announced that Couric had signed a record US$40-million contract,[citation needed] and would begin hosting a daytime talk show for its Disney-ABC Domestic Television arm that would debut in September 2012; Couric would also contribute to ABC News programming.[45] On August 22, 2011, it was announced that Couric's talk show would be called Katie. Katie is the second web show that Couric has been affiliated with, the first being @katiecouric on the CBS Evening News. The first episode aired on September 10, 2012.[46][47]

Disney-ABC Domestic Television renewed Katie for a second season starting in fall 2013.[48] However, in October 2013, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Katie was close to cancellation because of a low Q Score, low ratings, and a reported disdain of her core female audience. The syndicated show averaged a 1.7 household rating during its first season and a 1.8 in the 2013–14 season.[49] In December 2013, Disney–ABC Domestic Television announced that Katie had been canceled.[50][51] Production was scheduled to continue until June 2014.[52]

In June 2017, after Verizon purchased Yahoo! and combined it into Oath, Couric decided to end her contract at Yahoo! News, preferring to work with them on a "project basis" only, while she continues to expand her own production company.[55]

In 2011, she gave the university commencement speech at Boston University and was awarded another doctoral degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.[65] She has also hosted a Sesame Street special, "When Families Grieve". The special, which aired on PBS on April 14, 2010,[citation needed] dealt with the issues that children go through when a parent dies.[66] On February 6, 2011, Couric guest-starred on the post-Super Bowl episode of Glee, playing herself interviewing Sue Sylvester after the cheerleading team lost the championship. Sylvester sarcastically referred to Couric as "Diane Sawyer" during the segment.[67]

In December 2013, Couric ran a segment on the HPV vaccine[72] which critics accused of being too sympathetic to the scientifically unsupported claims that this vaccine was dangerous.[73] For example, Seth Mnookin accused her broadcast of employing false balance. In addition, Alexandra Sifferlin, of Time magazine, compared Couric to Jenny McCarthy, a well-known anti-vaccine celebrity.[74] On December 10, 2013, a week after the original segment was aired, Couric posted an article on The Huffington Post responding to this criticism, in which she stated:

I felt it was a subject well worth exploring. Following the show, and in fact before it even aired, there was criticism that the program was too anti-vaccine and anti-science, and in retrospect, some of that criticism was valid. We simply spent too much time on the serious adverse events that have been reported in very rare cases following the vaccine. More emphasis should have been given to the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccines.[75]

Throughout the 2010s, Couric served as executive producer on several films. In 2014, Couric was an executive producer and narrator for the documentary Fed Up, examining the food industry and obesity in the United States.[76][77] In 2016, Couric was an executive producer and narrator for the documentary Under the Gun, examining gun violence and gun control in the United States.[78] The documentary was criticized for having an eight-second pause for "dramatic effect" inserted instead of the answer given to a question Couric posed to a gun-rights group in Virginia. Couric posted a response on the documentary's website stating, "I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL)", and she included a transcript of the response she received.[79] Later that year, the VCDL filed a defamation lawsuit for $12 million against Couric and the film's director, Stephanie Soechtig, for continuing to promote and distribute the film without correcting the pause.[80][81] The lawsuit was dismissed after a Virginia judge determined that the film scene was neither false nor defamatory.[82] In 2015 Couric founded Katie Couric Media, a film production company which has partnered with National Geographic to produce several documentaries. The first of these, Gender Revolution, premiered in 2017.[83] She was also an executive producer of Flint, a 2017 Lifetime drama about the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.[84][85] In 2018, Couric hosted a docudrama series titled America Inside Out with Katie Couric, which was telecast on the National Geographic Channel.[86]

Couric is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. CFR is a U.S. international think tank composed of government officials, corporate executives, and media moguls, promoting globalization as the key factor in modern foreign policy.[87]

Couric married attorney John Paul "Jay" Monahan in 1989.[88] She gave birth to their first daughter, Elinor Tully "Ellie" Monahan,[89] in Washington, D.C., in 1991;[90] their second daughter, Caroline "Carrie"[89] was born in New York City in 1996.[91] Her husband died of colon cancer in 1998 at the age of 42.[88] Couric then became a spokeswoman for colon cancer awareness. She underwent a colonoscopy on-air in March 2000, and, according to a study published in 2003 in Archives of Internal Medicine, may have inspired many others to get checked as well: "Katie Couric's televised colon cancer awareness campaign was temporarily associated with an increase in colonoscopy use in two different data sets. This illustrates the possibility that a well-known individual can draw attention and support to worthwhile causes."[92]

Her sister Emily Couric, a VirginiaDemocratic state senator, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54 on October 18, 2001. Couric gave a eulogy at the funeral. She pointed out that it irritated Emily when people asked her if she was Katie Couric's sister. She told the mourners, "I just want you to know I will always be proud to say 'I am Emily Couric's sister'." Couric has two other siblings, Clara Couric Bachelor and John M. Couric, Jr.

Couric was the honored guest at the 2004 Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation fall gala.[94] As the Guest of Honor for the inaugural American Cancer Society Discovery Ball, Couric was recognized for her leadership in increasing cancer awareness and screening.[95] In 2011, Couric became the Honorary National Chair of the National Parkinson Foundation's Moving Day campaign, a grassroots campaign to spotlight Parkinson's disease awareness on a national level.[96] Couric's father died in 2011 at age 90 from complications due to Parkinson's disease.[97]

In September 2013, she became engaged to financier John Molner after a two-year relationship.[89] Couric married Molner in a small, private ceremony at her home in The Hamptons on June 21, 2014.[98] The two star in the online cooking series Full Plate with Katie & John, appearing on the Sur La Table website.[99][100]